Michael Sherrard

Michael Sherrard, who has died aged 84, was considered one of the finest
advocates of his generation, and as a junior barrister in 1962 defended
James Hanratty, 25, in a highly controversial capital case.

An hour after daybreak on August 23 1961 Michael Gregsten and his lover Valerie Storie were discovered in a lay-by at Deadman’s Hill, eight miles from Bedford on the A6. Gregsten, a married man in his thirties, had been shot dead at point-blank range; Valerie Storie, 23, had been raped and repeatedly shot, but survived. Hanratty was arrested several weeks later.

Sherrard might have been forgiven for feeling daunted; at the age of 33 it was his first capital case, and it was rare (but not unprecedented) for a member of the Junior Bar to conduct a defence in a murder trial without the benefit of a more experienced leading counsel. In the event he was assigned a junior of his own, John Ellison, 30.

Sherrard argued for the case to be heard at the Old Bailey, but it was moved to Bedford Assizes, where local feelings were running high. Even before he appeared at the committal hearing in November, Sherrard immersed himself in building a defence, and was particularly keen to shore up Hanratty’s alibi – that on the murder night he had been in Liverpool trying to fence stolen jewellery.

When, disastrously, Hanratty changed his alibi in the course of his 21-day trial (then the longest in English legal history), saying he had drifted from Liverpool to the North Wales resort of Rhyl on the day of the murder, Sherrard repeatedly warned him of the dangers of making such a switch midway through a case and made him sign a statement to the effect that this was his decision and his alone.

With a reputation as a relentless inquisitor, the pugnacious Sherrard also had the task of cross-examining the chief prosecution witness, Valerie Storie . Paralysed for life after her ordeal, she gave her evidence from a wheelchair, arousing universal sympathy. But Sherrard’s task was to shake the credibility of her testimony.

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“Miss Storie,” he began, “I want you to understand quite clearly that I am in no way attempting to belittle the horrifying experience you underwent, or the magnitude of the tragedy which overtook you. I am sure your courage must be admired by everyone, but you will appreciate, on the other hand, that my plain duty to my client is to attempt to save his life and, indeed, to see that he is not imperilled by anything other than the basis of objective evidence and objective evidence alone.”

His efforts were not enough. When Hanratty was convicted and sentenced to death, Sherrard visited him in the cells below the court, as he had done daily throughout the trial. “Jim”, Sherrard recalled, looked so young. Although manacled between two prison warders, he immediately shook Sherrard’s hand, and reassured him: “Don’t you go upsetting yourself, sir. You’ve done everything you could. We’ll appeal.”

Although Sherrard secured the services of Gerald Gardiner, QC, to conduct that appeal, Hanratty would not hear of it and again insisted on Sherrard. “If I’m going down,” Hanratty told him, “I’m going down with you.” When the appeal failed, Sherrard unsuccessfully pleaded for his client’s life in an impassioned letter to the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, and visited Hanratty in prison to say goodbye.

For decades, inconsistencies and flaws in the prosecution case led many to believe that Hanratty had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Peter Alphon, a drifter, matched the identikit description given by Valerie Storie of her attacker, and before his death in 2009 had claimed to have been the killer. However, Sherrard was present in 2002 when the Appeal Court ruled that scientific evidence obtained through new techniques confirmed Hanratty’s guilt “beyond doubt”. Even then, however, Hanratty’s defenders claimed that the DNA evidence used had been “contaminated”. Contemporary doubts about the case are thought to have contributed to the abolition of the death penalty three years after Hanratty was hanged.

Observers at Hanratty’s trial discerned something of the great defender Sir Edward Marshall Hall in Sherrard’s courtroom style. “Something reminiscent of the jolting histrionics of the great Edwardians is being injected once more into the pleading of criminal cases,” noted one. “[Sherrard] has the nerve to bring a full murder trial to a dead, silent stop for a whole physical minute — as he did at Bedford — just to prove a point of possible human fallibility.”

Michael David Sherrard was born on June 23 1928 in London, where his father was a manufacturer of ladies’ lingerie. Brought up in Finchley, Michael struggled at school with what is now recognised as dyslexia, and studied for his matriculation as an external student at Hendon Technical College.

When he was 16 he was taken by his civics teacher to observe a murder trial at the Old Bailey, where he was spellbound by the sight of the theatrical John Maude, KC, in full forensic flight. Having resolved on the spot to become a barrister, he studied Law at King’s College, London, graduating in 1949, and was called to the Bar by Middle Temple the same year.

Sherrard served his pupillage with the criminal lawyer Charles Du Cann, known as “the Duke”, and Morris Finer, who combined his work as a leading commercial barrister with writing the light-hearted Saturday leader for the London Evening Standard.

A day after qualifying, clad in his stiff new wig and gown at the London Sessions, Sherrard was amazed to be given a dock brief, defending (unsuccessfully) a man accused of running a travelling brothel of under-age girls. The defendant explained that he had chosen Sherrard because, of the lawyers available, “you was wearin’ ’eavy ’orn-rimmed glasses — that means brains”.

While building a busy legal practice as a tenant at Hare Court and later at 2 Crown Office Row, Sherrard appeared in cases ranging from divorce and fraud to general crime. In 1955 he was auditioned by Granada Television as a potential news presenter, only to be pipped by a fellow barrister, Robin Day.

By 1965 Sherrard mostly dealt with civil cases. He appeared for the actress Judy Garland in a dispute with the London Palladium impresario Val Parnell, and his other celebrity clients included the actor Trevor Howard, the comedian Sid James and the entertainer Bruce Forsyth.

In 1968 he was involved in the litigation that followed the collapse of John Bloom’s washing machine empire. Sherrard also acted for the liquidator in the wake of the collapse of Dr Emil Savundra’s Fire, Auto and Marine Insurance Co, trying to recover some of the losses from Savundra’s personal assets.

Four years after becoming head of chambers at Crown Office Row in 1974, Sherrard was briefed to defend Joyce McKinney, the former Miss Wyoming accused of kidnapping her ex-lover, the Mormon missionary Kirk Anderson, for whom she famously declared she would have “skied down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose”. But she jumped bail before her Old Bailey trial, leaving Sherrard without a client.

He also appeared at the inquiry into the financial dealings of John Stonehouse, Postmaster-General in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, who faked his own death in 1974, leaving his clothes on a beach in Florida before fleeing to Australia with his secretary.

During the later 1970s and 1980s he appeared in numerous commercial, fraud and corruption cases in the Far East, particularly Singapore and Hong Kong. In the wake of the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985, he appeared for the Belgian government in extradition proceedings against Liverpool football supporters.

A member of the South Eastern Circuit since 1950, Sherrard took Silk in 1968 and served as a Crown Court Recorder from 1974 until 1993, when he retired from the Bar. The Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, before whom Sherrard appeared in trials and appeals, regarded him as “the best of advocates”, while Robert Rhodes, QC, one of the doyens of the criminal Bar, considered him to combine “enormous ability and hard work with charm and modesty”.

Sherrard was appointed CBE in 2003.

He was a member of the Winn Committee on Personal Injury Litigation (1966) and of the council of Justice, the British section of the International Commission of Jurists (1974–2000). With the barrister Linda Goldman he co-authored his memoirs, Wigs and Wherefores, in 2008.

Sherrard was a celebrated raconteur and a gifted mimic and cartoonist. He minted many witticisms during his career at the Bar: in the course of one case he described a wrecked French car as “not so much smashed-up as a Citroën pressé”.

Michael Sherrard married, in 1952, Shirley Bagrit, who survives him with their two sons.